Netanyahu slams PA president's 'NY Times' op-ed; likely to expand to Congress on steps he is willing to take if Hamas not in PA gov't.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu crossed swords with Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday, saying an op-ed Abbas penned in Tuesday’s
New York Times was a “gross distortion” of history.

Netanyahu leaves
for Washington on Thursday, and is expected to argue against recognition of a
Palestinian state at the UN in September.

Abbas argued in print for that
recognition, saying such an acknowledgement would mend a historic
wrong.

“It is important to note that the last time the question of
Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question
posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be
partitioned into two states,” Abbas wrote in the Times.

“In November
1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered in the
affirmative.

“Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian
Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and
Arab armies intervened.

War and further expulsions ensued,” he
wrote.

Aghast at what sources in the Prime Minister’s Office termed
Abbas’s Stalinist-style rewriting of history, Netanyahu issued a statement
calling it a “a gross distortion of well-known and -documented historical facts.”

“It was the Palestinians who rejected the partition plan for two states while the Jewish leadership accepted it,” Netanyahu said.

Arab armies, with the
assistance of Palestinian forces, “attacked the Jewish state in order to destroy it. None of this is mentioned in the article,” the statement said.

Netanyahu also took strong issue with
another part of the op-ed, where Abbas writes that Palestine’s admission to the
UN “would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal
matter, not only a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue
claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the
International Court of Justice.”

In response, Netanyahu said, “One could conclude from the article that the Palestinian leadership views the establishment of a Palestinian state as a means to continue the conflict with Israel instead of ending it.”

Government sources said that calling for a Palestinian
state to be a platform for continuing the struggle against Israel was
“diametrically opposed to how we in Israel and in the international community
see it.

“We see the issue of Palestinian statehood as ending the
conflict, Abbas is saying they want a state to continue the struggle against
Israel.”

The sources said it was extremely problematic for the
Palestinian leader to divorce the issues of peace and statehood, and to say that
the purpose of a state is not peace, but rather to get a better platform to
continue the struggle against Israel.

Based on the PA president’s column,
the sources said, “One can only conclude that Abbas has abandoned even the
pretense of embracing the path of peace and instead chosen a strategy to
establish a Palestinian state and use this improved position to wage a
diplomatic and legal war against Israel.”

According to the sources,
“Abbas’s strategy for the past two years has been to avoid a negotiated
settlement with Israel.

“That’s why he avoided Netanyahu’s continued call
for negotiations. That’s why he placed a settlement freeze as a precondition for
negotiations, something he never did before in the 18 years of
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. That’s why he walked away from peace talks
last September.”

And, the sources added, “That’s why he had no qualms
about forging a pact with Hamas, which refuses to recognize the existence of
Israel and refuses to abandon terrorism.”

Meanwhile, sources in the Prime
Minister’s Office said there was an open line of communication between the
office and the White House, and that each was briefing the other on the content
of the speeches that Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama will deliver on the
Middle East in the coming days.

Obama is scheduled to deliver an address
focused on the region at the State Department on Thursday, just a few hours
before Netanyahu is scheduled to take off for Washington.

The two men are
scheduled to meet on Friday morning.

Obama will then address the annual
American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference on Sunday morning, with
Netanyahu addressing that same body on Monday, and delivering a speech to
Congress on Tuesday, which aides said would be his key address during his
trip.

Government sources said the prime minister’s speech to Congress
would likely focus on three interweaving topics: the revolutions in the Arab
world, Iran, and the diplomatic process with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu,
who is expected to “put more meat” on the principles that he enumerated in a
speech to the Knesset on Monday, is also expected to tell Congress that if the
Palestinians move back to negotiations and the “direction of peace,” then “the
door is open and we are willing to go very far.”

But, the aides said,
this willingness to move forward will be conditional on not including an
unreformed Hamas inside a PA government.

“Everything will be
conditional,” one official said. “The pact with Hamas is a litmus test, and
there is no way of moving forward as long as there is in an alliance with
Hamas.”

Washington sources, meanwhile, are anticipating that Obama will
strike a nonconfrontational tone with Israel in his Middle East speech on
Thursday, as well as in his meeting with Netanyahu.

There was little
expectation that Obama would venture into great detail of the Israeli-
Palestinian peace process, much less address the controversial final-status
issues.

Instead, one Washington hand suggested that the furthest the
White House was likely to go was into a reframing of the formula US Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton has long used as the basis for resolving the
conflict.

“We believe that through good-faith negotiations the parties
can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the
Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines,
with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and
recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli
security requirements,” Clinton said in 2009 after Netanyahu announced a partial
settlement freeze.

This estimation stood in contrast with a frontpage
story in Yediot Aharonot on Tuesday that said Obama would classify the
settlements as “illegal,” and would call on Israel to return to the 1967 lines
with negotiated border adjustments.

The report said this was the message
that emerged from talks that new National Security Council head Ya’acov Amidror
and his predecessor Uzi Arad held in Washington in recent days with White House
National Security Adviser Tom Donilon.

The report said Amidror and Arad
asked that changes be made in a draft of Obama’s speech.

But Amidror
unequivocally denied this in an Army Radio interview, saying Obama’s speech “did
not come up in meetings between me and the national security adviser of the US,
and not with his aides. Not in one manner, or another,” he said.

One
Washington insider said there was “a lot of skepticism in the administration
about Netanyahu, about being able to make any progress with him, so why exert
any political capital?” He said that skepticism combined with the Palestinian
unity deal and the attacks along Israel’s borders on Sunday made the
administration unlikely to see room to push the process forward.

Still,
he added that the White House saw no advantage in provoking
Netanyahu.

“There will be efforts on both sides to make this a feel- good
visit,” he said.

There is wide speculation that during his AIPAC speech
Obama will announce a trip to Israel to coincide with the June conference
President Shimon Peres is organizing.

Speaking after talks with Jordan’s
King Abdullah at the start of a week of intense diplomacy, Obama pledged to keep
pressing for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite
his failure so far to break the impasse.

With the Jordanian monarch
sitting at his side in the Oval Office, Obama suggested that unrest sweeping the
Middle East offered a chance for Israel and the Palestinians to seek progress
toward resolving their own long-running dispute.

“Despite the many
changes – or perhaps because of the many changes that have taken place in the
region – it’s more vital than ever that both Israelis and Palestinians find a
way to get back to the table and begin negotiating a process whereby they can
create two states living side by side in peace and security,” Obama told
reporters.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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